Just like the other two Microfiction that preceded them (in 2007 and 2018, Goncourt short story award), the Microfiction 2022 by Régis Jauffret form a big multiple and pitiless novel in which love is a vulgar thing and where happiness does not exist. With his pointillist touch, five hundred times and always in less than two pages, the author of Fragments of people’s lives (2000) anduniverse, universe (2003, December prize) offers us, in the first person, the range of human darkness in so many cruel tales. To cleanse the characters of their obsessions, bleach, chlorinated soap, poison and jets of acid flow in streams, instruments alternately of suicides or premeditated murders. A machine for inventing stories that is strong and that draws, through its abundance, a strongly biased portrait of humanity, “this skeleton factory”. In what is most vile, banal, sordid or tragic. Nihilistic, but still fascinating.
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